Evaluation - Stephen Neal

9 Title Sequence

1, 2 & 6

• This shows characterisation well.
• The two characters acknowledge each other with a nod however the girl is not featured.
• Its easy to see the differences between the characters here which is exactly what we wanted to be able to do in our film.
• 6 shows how the alcohol is influencing the life of the main character.
• The close up on the boy and the framing of the man accentuates their power. As well as this the composition of placing the man behind the metal door with the window mainly up makes it seem as though he is being held back, almost as though he is dangerous. This is something we wanted to achieve within our film.
• The desaturation of the film here works really well to highlight the film and make it seem in a universal time period.
• The lighting in these scenes highlights the characters and their body language and facial expressions.

3 & 6

• These clips show how simple the use of Mise En Scene can be to be effective and suggest representations to the audience.
• In 3 you can see how the female has a ring and they boy is playing with a bird feather. This suggested that the girl should be interested with jewellery and appearance whereas the boy should like animals, wildlife and hunting. We wanted our props to give this level of suggestion to the audience. Similarly in 6 the bottle's label suggests to the reader the problem between the two characters may have something to do with the central alcohol.
• the camerawork in 6 uses depth of field to draw the audiences attention to and from the bottle of alcohol highlighting the problem. We tried to use this at a stage within our film.
• the positioning of the characters within the scene gives them each importance in different ways.
• costume was incredibly important for us to show the trouble our character was in. 3 has done this well as the boy is again shown to be adventurous with this clothing whereas the female has her hair done nicely.

4 & 5

• The editing here allows the two scenes o dissolve into each other beautifully which we tried hard to achieve in a number of moments of our film.
• The non-diagetic soundtrack doesn't change allowing the editing to complement the sound.
• The editing effect and the narrative structure here are very good. We liked these effects and tried hard to replicate them at times within our film.
• The lighting effects here highlight the main props in the film, for example the bottle and the crystal he looks through.

6

• The conventions of drama shown through alcoholism are well known to many. We tried to achieve this with our film however the alcohol was not as prominent as we wanted.
• The trouble that the couple are going through is typical of drama.
• The use of a Close Up shot on the bottle also emphasizes the importance of the bottle.
• the shallow depth of field acts to draw attention from the bottle directly to the female leaving, clearly showing the link between the two.

7, 8 & 9

• The narrative structure jumps forward within these two scenes.
• Achieving this in our film was a priority as time needs to jump forward in our film.
• Our narrative structure needs to reveal the prologue at the very end of the film and during the ending credits.
• We liked this kind of narrative structure and thought it would work well within our film, so we tried to replicate it with our use of camera work and  editing. 
• The camera work here was really nice we really liked the shot types and the movement so we tried to use as much of it as possible within our production.

Poster & Review

Poster

Batman Poster

The purpose of the poster was to show to our target audience the key themes and issues within our film. We really wanted to make sure that our audience would see this poster and react positively toward it and want to view our film. We took some inspiration from the "Batman" film poster with the main character being the prominent icon and the background holding the symbol for the film. For us this was Jordan and the broken glass to symbolise violence. 

The colours we used suggest danger and anger to the audience of our poster. This was necessary to attract our target audience. As well as this the simplicity of the design brings the audiences attention to Jordan as the main character, allowing the audience to understand the role he plays in the short film, helping them to understand. However we restricted the view of Jordan to increase the mystery of his character and what he actually looks like. As well as this it should help to develop the film by making the audience wonder why he is turning away and wanted to hide from the rest of the world and look away.

Our "Logo" Ideas

The reviews on the poster have the same aesthetic design as the title, tagline and the information sections. We wanted to make sure there was a set theme for the poster, but also to make sure it wasn't too organised and still looked chaotic, to stay in-line with our film. After some experimenting the ripped-paper effect I created was chosen to keep the key themes but also remain unkempt. As wells as this, it also bears similarities to album artwork from the Arctic Monkeys which will allow our audience to make connections to it and also build a sense of knowing and wanting to see the film.

As our actor is within the age bracket of our target audience, we hope they will want to view our film all the more as they will feel they may have more understanding due to the similarity in their ages. Due to this we made sure our poster focused on him.

Summary for poster

• Colours have connotations of the thriller genre.
• Actors image is positioned to look away from the audience to build intrigue an make them want to see more of him.
• His age is in our target audience so they can easily make a connection to him.
• It has themes that are similar to album covers and other movies that appeal to our target audience.

Our Review. Found Here:

The review have a different function from the poster as it is much more in depth and will reveal a lot more of the story and plot that we may want. Due to this we will have to make sure that it keeps the waned detail but does not have too much of the plot involved. As well as this we had to be sure that it followed the house style of "Little White Lies" and use the same language and colloquialisms that they use.  

We followed their conventions with the layout and the image at the top of the review being a snapshot from the film. However the audience of "Little White Lies" is not our target audience. We couldn't put together a review for the audience we wanted to attract. We had to focus on elements on the film that would not have been as important for our audience

Summary of Review:

• Was not aimed at our target audience.
• Followed the conventions to the best of our ability.
• We used their lexical choices, layout and grading system to match the house style.

Here is my evaluation film

Our Target Demographic

• Young Adults
• 16 - 25
• Mainly a male audience however not dis-regarding females

We used different means to collect our audience feedback.

One method was facebook:

The Advantages of this:

• We can easily access the target audience we want.
• Its well known so we can access a large amount of people with our questions.
• Its very easy to use and made receiving the information a lot easier. 

The Disadvantages of this:

• The audience may be biased due to the fact that we know the people who answered our questions.

We asked the target audience to comment on the poster:

Poster

Proof of feedback


Some people said that the hands being slightly covered with the images doesn't look great. This would be changed however due to the fact we need to keep the images justified we could not change the layout. As well as this we could not move the image of Jordan higher else the title and actor names would not fit properly and would look compressed.

We had one comment that said the images looked too separate and needed to be blended in more. We attempted this however the more blurred the main image becomes, the more unrealistic it becomes. As well as this it could minimise the understanding given to the audience. However if this is preferred we will make and keep this change as to appease a larger audience with our poster.

Main points to fix:

• The hands were obscured by the logo's and text.
• The text was not justified each side.
• The images seem too distant from each other
• Jordan needed to be blended more was commented to us.
• This is a problem as any more blurring made him appear distorted and overly blurred at the edges.
• We had already tried to blend the two images (Jordan and the Glass) together so doing more was too much. 

If you look at the main poster upload now you can see these changes have been made.

Our first versions of the poster received mixed feedback:

1

2

3

4

Here we can see how some of the first ideas developed, moving from left to right. Figure one looked far too supernatural and made the film seem more about the house than the actual plot and it misdirected many of the people we asked. Figure two was the advancement of this idea however again it was not what we were looking for and we felt that it did not actually portray what we wanted about the film so we dropped the idea.

At the same time we were working on developing figure three. When we asked members of our target audience about this poster they really liked the idea and though it would be great to have the perspective of looking at him through the glass. Technically however we had trouble with this as making the glass see-through but still seen was very difficult and it looked somewhat crude.

What did we learn:

• Glass is to difficult to work with when it is in the foreground.
• Making the image fit the conventions of a thriller poster is difficult.
• Making sure the colours match the theme is very important.
• Fitting all the text into a justified position really helps with the aesthetic look of the poster.

Review

The first draft had some points for us to fix:

• The text needed re-formatting and some sizes needed work.
• The grading at the end was too small to read and we needed to bold the numbers.
• The initial image we had came under scrutiny from our peers so we decided to alter it to the image you can seen in the photograph.

Once these points had been addressed and some slight re-wording had been implemented we received a high standard from our feedback and decided that to change it any more would jeopardised its quality so we kept it the way it was.

We also did some polling with the introduction to our film (As seen here)

The audience feedback for the title sequence:

• Many found the sporadic text to seem like the beginning of a horror and reminded some people of the title sequence of "SE7EN"

• They found the text distracting and unnecessary.
• Once some were informed of the plot of the story, they said that they felt version one would have been better as it would jump from tranquillity to pandemonium. This would be better for our genre.

Other Film Feedback:

• Our very early shots had many faults and continuity errors.
• We had some shots that were too long.
• at one stage our actor had a hair cut so we had to re-film many scenes.
• When dragging Danni out of the kitchen people commented that she was breathing so we needed to re-film that scene.

Maintained Faults

• There is a continuity error at the beginning where the phones shows up a call from "Dad" whereas our actor states "Hey Mum". A number of viewers found and scrutinised this to us.
• This lead to some of our audience "became aware" that they were watching a film and the realism was ruined from then on and they were drawn out of the narrative.
• If we were able to go back to our filming we would fix this error.

Positive Feedback

The main positive feedback we attained was where a member of our feedback group stated he noticed a link between "Lovefield" and our piece. This is significantly useful for us as "Lovefield" was a piece that inspired our work. We tried to use many different techniques from love field from the grasping of the phone to the soundtrack and the bird noises we added in during editing.

Here is my Prezi presentation:

Evaluation on Prezi

(Should there be any problems please click this link for a direct transfer to the web-page)
http://prezi.com/z_a2n-0cjuzz/evaluation/

Killer Hangover Final Poster

Killer Hangover Review - Little White Lies

Final version of our LWL review

Above is the image for our final design for our review in the style of Little White Lies. It was important to ensure the layout of the review reflected the in-house style of the print edition so we utilized InDesign to craft our final piece. The actual review is also written with the target audience of the magazine in mind.

The review reads as followed:

'The morning after the night before'. This is the tagline of the newly released short film Killer Hangover. Although the title and tagline instantly suggest a lack of innovation from the young team of film-makers, the narrative adopted in the ambitious piece transforms the well-worn genre of horror into a fresh canvas for the exploration of ideas on the silver screen. This is achieved through the team's willingness to experiment with diverse influences, from Ratthe's short film sensation Lovefield to classic Hopkins' horror features.

In addition to the debutant director, Killer Hangover introduces the film audience to the fresh-faced actor, Jordan Oberdries, who plays the nameless young antagonist who wakes up to a smashed house, a splitting headache and stained carpets.... Oh, and the small issue of a dead girl on the kitchen floor. Immediately cast into a crazed panic, our subject anxiously endeavors to not only piece together the fragmented events of last night but also protect himself from the ensuing condemnation that threatens to ensnare him from all angles. However, the sting of the narrative exists not in the safety of horror but in the creative closing twist...

The technical aspects of the film exhibit the team’s dynamism. Of particular note is Rory Harris’ editing technique, with his innovative use of split screening adding an extra dynamic to the piece. Soundtrack is also carefully crafted to parallel the visual aspects and establish suspense.

However, though demonstrating a significant level of promise, Killer Hangover isn't without flaw. Oberdries' performance often lacks the ability to convince, let alone instill the fear, anxiety and horror that the editing and soundtrack seek so desperately to establish. Although the rest of the piece seems to exude confidence and experience, the casting of Oberdries is the team's Achilles heel. In order to achieve the calibre of award-winning material this team is capable of, they must strive to overcome this weakness.

Despite this shortfall, Killer Hangover is a note-worthy experiment in the genre of horror by Neal and company, hinting at their ability to produce a higher level of film in the future. As is expected for a first piece, it presents it's weakness in equal proportion to it's successes but, unlike the crowds of 'tried and failed' and 'maybe next time' films, Killer Hangover is a colourful Monet with the promise of a Picasso on the horizon.'

Logo Update

In order for our poster and film to be synonymous with our branding, we have designed a logo to be used in both. The ripped effect has been used to support the narrative, with the idea of 'patching things up' quickly after the party being reflected in the logo. The use of capitals also gives the title dominance and authority, also suggesting serious content in the film. In addition, by layering the text on a label, there is a connotation to alchohol (see Arctic Monkey's album cover). We've created the inverted white version for use in the opening credits as it has a black background.